Word: weills
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...chief problem in talking about the Three-penny Opera at Lowell House in the days to come will be the choice of adjectives. "Brilliant" pretty well covers the production, but no one word is enough. Kurt Weill and Bert Brecht's composition is also beautiful and funny and splendid. A greatness of the opera lies in the fact that it is contrapuntally ugly and sad and tawdry. It is the grinning beggar on the street who wants to amuse but gets a raw pleasure from turning his check to show scars or festering gashes...
...Musical Society's performance is true to the authors in all respects. The seventeen-piece orchestra, including banjo, accordion, and harmonium, gave each of Weill's melodies the rich, lively treatment it deserved. Howard Brown's entire musical direction seemed devoted to finding just the right expressions within Weill's jazz idiom and successfully capturing them...
Many such productions, like "Saint Joan of the Stock Yards," and "The Rise of the City of Mahogany," were sharply cynical social criticisms. Mare Blitzstein translated one of these, "The Threepenny Opera," whose original script was by Brecht with score by Kurt Weill. This take-off on "The Beggar's Opera" employs such epic techniques as a blackout before songs, then a spot-light on one character who sings about the action and its implications. If the actor doesn't clarify the situation, there are placards on stage explaining what is being sung...
...talent and their warm sympathy for struggling composers, the Ajemian sisters rank high among this handful. Last week, at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pianist Maro and Violinist Anahid Ajemian played a representative program, including works by Austrian Ernst Krenek, American Alan Hovhaness, the late German Kurt Weill and Spaniard Carlos Surinach. The Ajemians not only played without a fee but ended the evening owing a sizable printer's bill for programs...
...Lowell House Musical Society will definitely present Kurt Weill's "The Three Penny Opera" from April 28 through May 1, Frederic M. Kimball '55, president of the society and director of the production, announced last night. Last Friday the House Committee found "insufficient support" for a petition calling for a dance in place of the opera on Saturday, April...